I Feel Peer-Pressured By My Friends to Drink While Pregnant

"You know you can have a glass of wine a day and it won't hurt the baby," my five-month-pregnant friend said to me as I ordered a Shirley Temple over dinner.

"Oh, I know," I replied. Of course I knew. I'd only Googled it sixteen or seventeen times. "Wine makes my stomach hurt right now. Being pregnant is weird, huh?"

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

That wasn't exactly true. Wine sits perfectly fine in my belly at the moment, but I felt like I had to give a reason that I didn't want to join her for a glass of wine…she was kind of judging me because, at four months pregnant, I wouldn't have a drink with her.

She wasn't the only one. Over the holidays, one of my relatives insisted I drink a glass of champagne with her. "We're celebrating the baby," she said without a hint of irony. I had to ask my husband to sneak my glass away when she wasn't looking and finish it himself.

And bartenders who can now see that I'm visibly pregnant offer me dark beer and longwinded explanations for why well-brewed brown craft beers are beneficial for the baby. "Vitamins," they say, and smile through their well-clipped facial hair.

For a long time, there was a taboo surrounding pregnancy and drinking. I remember when I was working as an entertainment reporter for the New York Daily News back in 2006 and Gwyneth Paltrow was spotted drinking a pint of Guinness while pregnant with Apple. The world lost its mind.

But sentiment has shifted. Maybe, like $125 cashmere socks, it is Gwyneth Paltrow's fault. These days, among my well-educated, successful, thirty-something prego friends, it seems like a badge of honor for a pregnant woman to carry around a wine glass or order a beer.

I never expected to feel like such a square as a pregnant lady. In fact, I naively believed that pregnancy would be the one time that peer pressure would completely evaporate from my life as everyone, women and men alike, just assumed I was choosing to do whatever was best for my unborn child. I thought I would have to beg people to give me a sip of their wine or their beer.

Like an alcoholic trying to hide their vice at a wedding, I'm quietly carrying around a glass of champagne and dumping it out in the bathroom sink.

And then there was one ob/gyn who pretty much told me that as long as I wasn't binge drinking everything would be A-OK. "A lot of those guidelines are in place for people who can't handle moderation," he told me.

On a couple of occasions, I tried ordering a glass of wine with dinner and sipping half a glass like a chic European lady or Betty Draper in Mad Men. And I felt fine. Rationally, I am sure that my baby felt fine, too.

Except I was wracked with guilt. So many things can go wrong in a pregnancy. If I'd learned anything since getting pregnant, it was that you live in a state of constant fear for ten months that you have done something terribly wrong to your child. My mother informed me that this was a feeling that would last for the rest of my life and one I should simply get used to.

As almost-mothers, women already beat themselves up all the time. Should I not have slept on my stomach? Am I eating too much sugar? Am I gaining too much weight? Am I not gaining enough weight? Is my baby freaked out by sex? Should I have more sex so that my baby knows how much I love his father? It's enough to drive a sane person off the deep end and drive someone with intermittent anxiety like myself directly into the loony bin. The truth is that I really don't need one more thing to beat myself up about.

I had to throw a lot of preconceptions about myself out the window when I got pregnant. I thought I would be calm, cool, and collected. I'd never be that woman who searched the Internet for every little symptom or furiously checked an app to see what vegetable her fetus resembled that week. Yeah, I ended up being that person. It's OK. I have other good qualities.

I'll never be the pregnant woman drinking a half glass of wine a day, and I'm mostly fine with that — even though I'm still lying to my friends about why not. Like an alcoholic trying to hide their vice at a wedding, I'm quietly carrying around a glass of champagne and dumping it out in the bathroom sink. But I don't feel guilty about that.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Redbook participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.